Perry's abortion proposal pointless

Updated 12:23 am, Sunday, December 23, 2012

Gov. Rick Perry's call for legislation banning abortions after 20 weeks in Texas is built on a specific certainty.

It's just not the certainty supposed: that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks. This, it turns out, is decidedly uncertain.

Laws, of course, should be guided by as many certainties as possible. That they aren't always is one of the certainties of life.

This is nowhere more apparent than in abortion laws, a more counterproductive set of edicts is hard to find in Texas and elsewhere.

In Texas, this would include the state's drive to oust Planned Parenthood “affiliates” from a critical health program for low-income women, though these entities perform no abortions and do most of the work in Texas preventing the unwanted pregnancies that can result in abortions. This is now in the courts.

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“Let me be clear, my goal ... is to make abortion at any stage a thing of the past,” he said, speaking at the Source Pregnancy Center in West Houston recently.

He acknowledged the existence of Roe v. Wade, which makes abortion legal and constitutional, but he reasoned that “compelling state interests” allow Texas to prevent “the suffering of our state's unborn.”

The ability for fetuses to feel pain at 20 weeks has been the rationale for the kind of bill Perry seeks. But the last study I found on the subject reported that fetuses could distinguish painful touch from general touch at 35 to 37 weeks, though to a lesser extent at 28 weeks. This study came from University College London and was published in the journal Current Biology last year.

“Pain perception requires conscious recognition or awareness of a noxious stimuli,” the doctor's said in the research abstract. “Fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalamocortical connections.”

The fibers that enable these begin appearing at 23 to 30 weeks and don't allow for a fetus having “functional pain perception” before 29 or 30 weeks.

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The study concludes: “Evidence regarding the capacity for fetal pain is limited but indicates that fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester.”

So, if there is nothing conclusively magic about 20 weeks and Roe v. Wade still exists, the real certainty here is that the governor is attempting an end-run around what is constitutionally protected.

But why might a woman not consider abortion until 20 weeks or beyond? I turned to Deborah McNabb, a former Planned Parenthood medical director, a board member and someone who had a private ob/gyn practice.

First, malformation or genetic defect might not become evident until later.

Then there are simply women in difficult circumstances. These might include being a minor, a rape or incest victim, but there are any number of other reasons that might result in delay and denial out of shame or fear.

Some women might initially decide to go to term but later find their relationships or circumstances untenable.

The procedure might be cost prohibitive. So, if 20 weeks is the rationale, that doesn't work medically or for any other number of reasons. Twenty weeks in any case is not 24, this being the accepted point of viability.

So, the governor's proposal has counter-productive written all over it.